


Zero at the bone

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [10]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: 'just like in the movies' oh Elisa, Angst, Character Study, Dark, Epiphanies, Gen, Period-Typical Sexism, Resilience, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 21:42:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13373619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: After Strickland's harassment, Elisa hits rock bottom – but it's a dive, not a fall.





	Zero at the bone

**Author's Note:**

> GAH, that particular scene...I'm glad we got that one sigh and locker-lean from Elisa in the movie, but I pictured her having a stronger reaction than that.

Drenched with cold sweat, Elisa dashes away from Strickland’s office, down the stairs, out of the Signals control room. Strickland’s words still hiss in her ears, filling her mind with static. When she reaches her cart, she doesn’t hear her bucket clank as she wedges it back into the cart base.

She almost walks right into Zelda’s admirer, Lou. "Hey there, shortcake. Zelda on break?" Elisa manages to nod. Lou winks. "I’ll go see if she needs a smoke lit. Keep it cool, no tales outta school.” With that, he lopes off, swinging his tool kit.

That should've been a nice moment, she thinks. Lou and Duane teased her like they teased Zelda, gently. Somehow they made her feel included, for all her differences. Unlike Strickland --

Strickland --

The static breaks. Elisa heaves herself through the nearest restroom door. She makes it to a sink in time. And throws up, and up, and up.

The instant her throat stops pulsing, she reels out, drags her cleaning cart in. Of course this happened in the nicest women’s restroom in all of Occam. It’s supposed to be especially spotless for the administrators and lady scientists. She should only be in here to clean. Not to recover from Strickland making a pass at her.

Elisa can still see the glint of Strickland’s sidearm, revealed when he’d knelt by her side. Feel the clamp of his spring-steel fingers caging her wrist. Hear what he’d murmured _: I don’t mind the scars… I like it. A lot. Kind of gets me going…_ He’d said it as if she’d want to hear such filth from a married man. From a torturer. A murderer. _Bet I can make you squawk, a little._ Every word of Strickland’s had veiled her in hot halitosis breath. He smelled like something had died inside him.

Remembering sends Elisa back over the sink, coughing up a last mouthful of bile.

Elisa shakes her head and runs water. She splashes extra disinfectant into the sink, lets it scorch her nostrils. Why, she wonders, doesn’t anybody tell Strickland about his breath? It comes to her that it’s because he is in charge. He can get away with anything.

It’s not the first time a man like this has crossed her path. A user. It is the first time it’s happened at work. That’s the part that takes something she can’t name away from her.   

Strickland’s targeted her because of what she isn’t. His cruel come-on named what she is. What she’s tried so hard not to be. A warm body going through the motions, a freak, not a person. Barely human. She glances at her cleaner’s hands. Her careful pink nail varnish, the watch she’d bought on layaway: they seem pathetic now. All her little efforts feel worthless. Giles had been right while trying to talk her out of tonight. Somebody like her was nothing.

The creature comes to mind, her perfect opposite, the one who means everything in this place. Nobody here gave the creature a name. She cannot think of one that is good enough. He is beyond words. Strickland himself can’t find one that sticks: an animal, that thing, an affront, the Asset. Not in the Lord’s image.  The creature –

Elisa blinks. The answer has been there all along, in that phrase for him. It’s how that decent scientist speaks of him, too. The creature: the creation. He embodies no human idea, but the natural world, in all its consoling strangeness. Elisa knew how she’d been supposed to feel in church. She always felt that way at the wrong time, looking at a sunset, a river, a falling leaf. While watching the creature. It makes sense, now, why she feels like he is everything.

With a little lift from that, Elisa dares to face herself in the mirror. It’s not encouraging. She’s pinched and harrowed, like she’s aged ten years since she went into Strickland’s office.

It is so terrible, that she is all the creature has. A nothing like her. 

A thought steals into Elisa, evil as Strickland’s stinking breath. The idea that freeing the creature will trap her.

She has never wanted to run away more. When a bully like Strickland declares himself, it’s only the beginning. As long as he is here, this place is his, every security camera one of his eyes. But leaving Occam is never going to be easy. Elisa knows she is half-trapped by her own self. Cleaning at Occam is the only job she’s ever had. It is where she sees Zelda every day. Giles himself, wise in fear, had brought it up. _Don't quit right away,_ he had said. _It'd be a marker, make them suspicious._

Elisa feels in a flash how Giles was right again. Not just about her, but about Zelda, too. She could just hear Zelda saying, _They'll fire me too because I'm black…I will not lose my job. God knows the last time Brewster brought home a dollar._ She couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t do that to Zelda.

Besides, this time, she’d walked out of Strickland’s office and escaped.

The creature, for all his beauty and meaning, can’t.

He cannot escape on his own. So, she will do it for him. Walk him right out of the place.

Even if it means she can’t do it a second time for herself.

Elisa faces the mirror again. For all that she’s as resolved as she was an hour ago, she hasn’t gotten any better looking in two minutes. Nonetheless, she slides a stray lock of hair back under her headband. Six hairpins, different shapes and sizes, are lined up above her left ear. One of them will surely pick the creature’s locks, just like in the movies.

As Elisa’s wiping up the last splash of bile, Yolanda, the cleaners’ manager, sticks her head in. She wrinkles her nose. "Stinks in here. Who puked?"

Elisa meets her eyes and shrugs. To think she’d flinched at Yolanda calling her ‘dummy’ the other day. It seems like nothing, now. She takes an air freshener can from the cart and sprays it, ostentatiously, between herself and Yolanda.

Yolanda takes a step back, nonplussed. "You…remember to write it up. Health and safety." A final, sour look around gives her nothing to criticize. She leaves.

Elisa checks her watch. It’s time to move. Briefly, she rinses her mouth out in the sink, checks her clothes. The last thing she wants tonight is more attention. She counts the hairpins a final time. She won’t touch them again until she’s in Lab T-4.

She imagines the empty tank afterwards, the scientists baffled, nothing there. Strickland in trouble, with ‘the Asset’ gone, nothing to torture. Angry and dangerous.

Her gut roils at the thought. But she doesn’t gag a third time.

Elisa eases the door open and noses her cart out, quietly on her way. Determined to leave them with a whole lot of nothing.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Several of Nature’s People / I know, and they know me / I feel for them a transport / Of Cordiality_  
>  But never met this Fellow / Attended or alone / Without a tighter Breathing / And Zero at the Bone --  
> Emily Dickinson
> 
> Two dark pieces in a row! Sometimes it's like that. Thank you to Piros and TotallyOttie for advance reading.


End file.
